Parting the Waters (7 page)

In 1909, they moved into the new house at 501 Auburn Avenue with their young daughter, Alberta. From childhood, she was homely in appearance, with blunt features and a rather squat frame, yet always known for her sweet shyness and humility. Neighbors considered her the kind of person who would not be noticed in a small crowded room, and relatives would even say she was “kind of fearful.” She lacked the assertiveness of her parents, perhaps intimidated by her father's achievements and by her mother's stature as the “First Lady of Ebenezer.” But she became an astute observer of church politics, as taught to her by both parents, and she developed an enormous strength—passive, absorptive, sure of herself—on her own ground, which was always church and family. Her refinements and talents were directed there. In both places, she would be a creature of refuge—organizer, comforter, facilitator. All her life she would be the official organist at Ebenezer and also at one of the auxiliaries of the National Baptist Convention.

Ebenezer members considered Reverend Williams an able preacher, but his reputation and influence outside the church derived primarily from his skills in real estate and civic action. He was the type who convened meetings, identified community goals, and got elected to chair committees he himself proposed. He became president of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers' Union, then floor leader of the Georgia delegation to the National Baptist Convention. Later, as the NBC's national treasurer and a member of both its foreign and home mission boards, Williams held some of the most influential positions of trust and patronage in the church of his time. For his community service, Morehouse conferred an honorary doctorate upon him in 1914, before he had even begun to build the new Ebenezer church. At the end of World War I, he sent Alberta to her mother's alma mater, Spelman.

By then, John D. Rockefeller was employing phalanxes of lawyers, bodyguards, and bureaucrats to protect him from those trying to beg or claim his money. In the spring of 1914, the “Ludlow massacre” secured his reputation as a principal villain in the history of labor unions, when Colorado militiamen attacked and burned a tent city of workers on strike against Rockefeller mining interests, killing six men by gunfire and thirteen women and children in the flames. A year later, Laura Spelman Rockefeller died, and the old man was obliged to keep her body in storage for three months until his lawyers worked out a truce with Ohio officials who threatened to arrest him under a $311 million tax judgment if he set foot in Ohio to bury her. Meanwhile, under pressure of old age, the new income tax law, inheritance taxes, and the U.S. government's antitrust case against Standard Oil, Rockefeller accelerated his charitable contributions, giving $100 million to the new Rockefeller Foundation and another $50 million to his General Education Board, which supported Baptist colleges. Of the latter amount, $10 million went to build a new chapel and expand the divinity school at the University of Chicago. Other Rockefeller donations created stately new buildings along the landscaped quad at Spelman. The Bessie [Rockefeller] Strong Building and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Building were completed by 1918, in time for the education of Alberta Williams. Mike King, later known as Martin Luther King, Sr., and still later as Daddy King, met her while she was studying there.

 

Mike King gazed at Alberta Williams from a considerable distance before he talked with her. To him, the gap between himself and the eminent minister's daughter was greater than the social distance between her and John D. Rockefeller. The latter two dressed in fine clothes and spoke proper English, whereas Mike King described himself as a semiliterate country bumpkin. Although he schemed to meet Alberta Williams for weeks, and planned to put on what airs he could, the first words he said in response to her greeting were, “Well, I'se preaching in two places.” He was wise enough to know that this would never do.

Born in December 1899, the second of ten children on a sharecropper's farm outside Stockbridge, Georgia, King had grown up currying mules, plowing fields, skipping most of what little school there was, and always living in fear of his father James. Late one night, a highly intoxicated James King began beating his wife Delia after starting an argument over whether she should cook a fish. Young Mike King was only fourteen, but he was barrel-chested and strong for his age. Somehow he managed to pull his enraged father off his mother and survive the desperate fight that ensued. When it was over, his father repeatedly vowed to kill him. Mother King eventually sold enough of the family livestock to buy a used Model T Ford for her son's escape to Atlanta. To Mike King, working as a laborer in an Atlanta tire plant, the car was a prize almost beyond imagination. Aside from status and mobility, the Model T gave him the means to pursue the most coveted profession open to unschooled Negroes, the ministry. The car allowed him to keep his regular job while seeking Sunday work at tiny churches that might hire any untrained circuit preacher who sounded all right and could get himself to their remote meetinghouses in the country. King found two such churches before he was twenty. He became a professional preacher in the time-honored manner of the ambitious former slaves, before he had been inside a church that could afford an organ.

He and thousands of preachers like him made up the rank and file of the National Baptist Convention. Immediately, young King began attending its local meetings, once driving out to Jonesboro, Georgia, to hear a scheduled address by the national treasurer, Rev. A. D. Williams. Williams failed to appear, but other speakers gave him the treatment customarily afforded NBC dignitaries anyway, praising him to the skies, not failing to mention the Christian attributes of all his family members, including the daughter at Spelman who had already organized a new choir at Ebenezer church. The description so struck young King that, by his own account, he told friends that very night that he would marry Alberta Williams, whom he had never met. The friends laughed at him.

By virtue of a coincidence that would later be called providential, King knew where Alberta Williams lived. His older sister, who had come from Stockbridge ahead of him, was one of the boarders at the Williams house. Still, her presence in a room of the target household was not much of an advantage. This was 1920, and the daughter was living in a dormitory at Spelman. Even polished Morehouse students from prominent families were allowed to call on Spelman women only on Saturdays at a specified hour, for a cumulative time not exceeding twenty minutes a month as punctiliously recorded by Spelman faculty supervisors. And such a glimpse of courtship was possible only if the Spelman student responded favorably to the man's calling card. On other days, Spelman rules allowed no visitors, nor any messages.

Fortunately for King, Alberta Williams broke her ankle and was obliged to spend several weeks convalescing at home. During that time, he visited his sister as often as possible, but even then he did not attempt to enter the sanctum of the house. The Williams family was strict, his sister advised, and to be the slightest bit forward was to risk not only his banishment from the premises, but hers. As a result, Mike King spent a lot of time polishing his Model T on Auburn Avenue, hoping Miss Williams would chance to sit on the front porch. Whenever she did, he watched her as much as he dared, while trying to think of a socially acceptable excuse to speak to her. His first venture ended quickly in disastrous retreat after his comment about preaching in two places. He thought the sound of his own voice condemned him as a farmhand. He also thought, however, that she had not emitted as much disapproval in those few seconds as she might have. In the postmortem, his sister warned him for the hundredth time that he could never enter the world of Alberta Williams without some education. King believed he had been preaching fairly well on common sense, fervor, and Sunday school memories, but now he began to see the social practicality of her advice.

After taking some tests at a local school for Negroes, he was stunned to learn that he could be admitted no higher than the fifth grade. He was twenty years old. Suddenly, years of humiliating pain loomed ahead of him, as he realized that he would have to shed his preacher's dignity to make a fool of himself in classrooms of children, working at night and studying in his sleep, just to finish high school. College—Alberta's level—lay somewhere beyond that, and marriage was nowhere in sight.

Mike King's determination was such that he resolved to push his way through the humiliation rather than avoid it. In an oversized desk among the younger students, he took up his studies, learning how to form words correctly in his mouth. Some months later, still a beginner, he came into luck on one of his regular spare-time patrols along Auburn Avenue. Alberta Williams was walking up the street, coming home from Spelman for an overnight visit. King tried to approach her boldly, now that his education was under way, but he faltered, muttering something about how she probably didn't remember who he was. “Oh, I couldn't forget meeting a preacher,” she replied, smiling. “My father wouldn't allow it.”

These were the first words from her that he would remember. They opened a whole world of church politics. To Reverend Williams, unlettered preachers like Mike King were his constituents in the outside realm of national Baptist affairs, just as the people who lived near Ebenezer were his constituents at home. They should be recognized, respected, and cultivated, not only by Williams himself but by his entire household. This was social justice and a family enterprise together, God's business and their business. His daughter knew her part well.

King asked her on the spot to consider opening a courtship with him. There was something about her reaction—shocked nearly to the edge of her poise, but not displeased—that made him sense the truth: no one had ever asked her to court. The Morehouse men had sent in no calling cards to her. When King pressed the matter, standing there on Auburn Avenue, she agreed to seek her father's permission. Soon they commenced a courtship in the old style—six years of teas, church socials, and chaperoned Sunday-afternoon rides in the Model T.

On those rides, they watched with admiration as workers built Reverend Williams' imposing new Ebenezer Baptist Church, which was completed in 1922. King told Alberta that he would have a church like that one day. He was full of plans. When they passed Atlanta Life Insurance Company and the other new businesses that were making Auburn Avenue a showplace of Negro enterprise, he would announce his intention to be part of that, too. He preferred to be part of a bank, such as the new Citizens Trust Company. Practically everybody in town followed the accumulation of its assets; barbers could tell you the current figure as a matter of common knowledge. Most of all, King would say, he wanted a big brick house like the ones on “Bishops' Row,” where the Methodist bishops who ran Morris Brown College lived. He would lay claim to these future possessions with the utmost authority and confidence, like Jehovah: let there be a brick house. This was his character, no doubt fortified by what he learned as an apprentice student of the Williams family. Success was a mixture of common sense, rigid adherence to a few well-chosen proverbs, and the projection of a successful image. The subtleties of Reverend Williams' approach to church politics all made sense to King, as did his moral rule that no preacher can prosper long by fleecing his people, as many tried to do. Finally, King understood why a preacher must embellish and polish himself to some degree, to pull the people behind him. Williams was known as Dr. Williams, possessed of two Morehouse degrees, but King found out that he had attended More-house only one year. Even the mighty were not that far removed from a lowly past like his own.

Reverend Williams, not unmindful that some Ebenezer members thought young King was aiming to marry the coveted Ebenezer pulpit along with his only daughter, withheld permission for the marriage. He sent Alberta away to Virginia for further schooling, but King waited loyally for her return a year later. For his part, King was so busy catching up on his education that for a number of years he didn't mind being tested. When he completed his high school equivalency in 1926 and permission still was not forthcoming, King knew what was lacking. He marched into the office of the Morehouse registrar and took a battery of entrance tests, which he failed miserably. The registrar told him to his face that he was “just not college material.” There was some schooling in him now, but he was still rough and plain. King's forte was power and bluster, as he demonstrated by walking out of the registrar's office, past an alarmed secretary, and into the office of Dr. John Hope, the Morehouse president. Hope, the best friend and benefactor of W. E. B. Du Bois, was so admired as an educator that Negro parents had been naming their children after him for years.
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He said almost nothing as King blurted out a speech about how he had always done things that people said were beyond him, that only five years earlier he couldn't even read but now he could, that he wanted to go to Morehouse no matter what the tests said, and if given the chance he would prove again that people underestimated him. Finally stopping himself, King waited vainly for a reply and then retreated from the office in despair. It was all over. A secretary caught up with him as he was leaving the campus. Back in the office, Hope wordlessly handed him an envelope and told him to take it to the registrar, who made no attempt to hide his disgust a few minutes later when he read the order to admit the bearer to classes at Morehouse.

Mike King and Alberta Williams were married at Ebenezer Baptist Church not long thereafter, on Thanksgiving Day of 1926. Reverend Williams arranged for three of the most prominent ministers in Atlanta to conduct the ceremony, and he gave away the bride. On returning from their honeymoon, the newlyweds moved into the middle upstairs bedroom in the Williams home on Auburn Avenue. The elder Williams couple were disposed to celebrate their only daughter's marriage but not yet her departure from the home—certainly not to the kind of place Mike King could afford as a part-time student and preacher. In later years, it would become evident that factors other than money kept Alberta Williams King in her childhood home, as she would live there for many years after her husband became the highest-paid Negro minister in Atlanta. He was a powerful man who nevertheless bent to the personal domination of another family, particularly its women. Like John D. Rockefeller, King lived with his in-laws until they died.